The Rules of Snow and Silver
1550 Words
(December 25 – Christmas Morning, 7:12 a.m. to 11:47 a.m.)
Aurora woke to sunlight on snow and the smell of cinnamon.
For one blissful second she forgot everything. Then memory slammed back (Mark’s flushed face, the shattering flute, the impossible man in the storm, the glowing mark now hidden beneath a borrowed flannel shirt that reached her knees).
She sat up too fast. The room tilted, then steadied. The fire had burned down to embers; someone had added two more logs while she slept. A tray waited on the nightstand: fresh coffee, thick socks folded like a gift, and a plate of cinnamon rolls still warm from the oven.
Her stomach growled traitorously.
The bedroom door was ajar. Through it drifted the low murmur of voices and the clink of dishes. Children laughing. A baby’s delighted squeal. The ordinary sounds of a house waking up on Christmas morning.
It felt like stepping into someone else’s life.
Aurora swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The wooden floor was warm (heated, she realized dimly). The cut on her palm had been re-bandaged with clean gauze. Someone had taken care of her while she slept. The thought made her throat tight.
She padded to the door and peered out.
A wide hallway opened into a great room that could have belonged on the cover of a holiday magazine: vaulted ceilings with exposed beams, a stone fireplace tall enough to stand in, windows looking out on a world of pure white. The Christmas tree here dwarfed the one she and Mark had decorated (real pine, twenty feet high, draped in silver and pale blue ornaments that caught the light like ice). Presents were already piled beneath it, wrapped in brown paper and twine.
A dozen people moved through the space with easy familiarity. A teenage boy balanced a toddler on his hip while pouring orange juice. An elderly woman with silver braids stirred something on the stove that smelled like heaven. Two little girls in matching red pajamas were trying (and failing) to hang a star on the tree without a ladder.
And in the middle of it all stood Lucien.
He wore a dark sweater now, sleeves pushed to the elbows, revealing forearms corded with muscle and faint scars. He was helping a boy of maybe eight lift a heavy box of ornaments, speaking too softly for Aurora to catch the words. When the boy grinned up at him, Lucien’s answering smile was small, crooked, and utterly transforming.
Aurora’s heart did something complicated.
She must have made a sound, because every head in the room turned at once.
Conversation stopped. Even the baby went quiet.
Then the silver-braided woman clapped her hands together once, delighted. “There she is! Merry Christmas, sweetheart. Come eat before these wolves devour everything.”
A dozen pairs of eyes (some gray, some gold, some warm brown) looked at her with open curiosity and something that felt disturbingly like welcome.
Aurora took one involuntary step backward.
Lucien was across the room in three strides. He didn’t touch her, but he angled his body between her and the others like a shield.
“Easy,” he murmured. “They’re family. They won’t hurt you.”
“I want to leave,” she said. The words came out steadier than she felt. “Now.”
Something flickered across his face (pain, maybe, or resignation). He nodded once.
“Of course.”
He led her down the hallway to the massive front door. It was carved from a single slab of oak, ancient-looking runes etched along the edges. Lucien pulled it open.
Aurora stopped breathing.
The doorway opened onto a wall of snow.
Not a drift (a wall). Four feet thick at the very least, packed hard as concrete, glittering in the morning sun. It rose straight up to the lintel and beyond, sealing the lodge as neatly as if the mountain had decided to bury them alive.
Lucien picked up a fire poker from a nearby stand and struck the snow. The metal rang, then rebounded. Not even a dent.
“Supernatural storm,” he said quietly. “Started the moment the bond snapped into place. It won’t let you leave until the Solstice vow is spoken. Or until…” He stopped.
“Until what?”
He met her eyes, silver bleeding into the gray. “Until the bond finishes what it started. One way or another.”
Aurora stared at the impossible wall of white. Somewhere beyond it was the real world (her phone, her car, her life). Here there was only this lodge, these strangers, and a man who looked at her like she was the answer to a question he’d been asking for two hundred years.
She swallowed hard. “How long?”
“Seven days,” he said. “Until midnight on New Year’s Eve. After that, if the vow isn’t sealed beneath the aurora…” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.
The elderly woman appeared at Lucien’s elbow, wiping her hands on an apron. “Eira,” she introduced herself, voice warm as fresh bread. “And you’re Aurora, which is perfect (dawn and starlight both). Sit, child. Eat. You look like you’ve been through a war.”
Aurora opened her mouth to refuse, but her knees chose that moment to wobble. Lucien’s hand shot out to steady her elbow. The moment his fingers touched her skin, warmth flared from the mark on her collarbone, spreading through her chest like sunlight.
She jerked away.
Eira’s sharp eyes missed nothing. “The fever’s started,” she said softly. “First stage. You’ll be cold soon, no matter how many blankets we pile on you. Come.”
Aurora let herself be led to the kitchen island because fighting felt suddenly exhausting. Someone pressed a mug of coffee into her hands. Someone else set a plate in front of her (three cinnamon rolls dripping with icing, still hot).
She ate mechanically. They tasted like childhood and comfort and every Christmas she’d tried to forget.
A little girl with braids and missing front teeth climbed onto the stool beside her. “I’m Freya,” she announced. “I’m six and a half. Are you really the Luna? Uncle Lucien said you’d come when the mountain opened. He’s been waiting forever.”
Aurora choked on cinnamon. “I’m not—”
“She is,” Lucien said from across the room. His voice was quiet, but it carried. “Whether she wants to be or not.”
The room went very still.
Aurora set her fork down. “I don’t even know what that means.”
Eira rested a gentle hand on her shoulder. “It means the mountain chose you for him. For all of us. And it doesn’t make mistakes.”
Aurora looked around at the faces watching her (hopeful, wary, kind). A teenage boy gave her a shy smile. The toddler on his hip reached out a chubby hand as if to touch the silver mark glowing faintly beneath her collar.
Something inside her chest cracked (not painfully, but like ice finally giving way to spring).
“I need air,” she whispered.
Lucien was already moving. “There’s a sunroom. No snow wall there.”
He led her through French doors into a glass-walled room filled with plants and sunlight. The storm still raged outside, but here it felt distant. A cushioned bench ran along one wall. Aurora sank onto it, wrapping her arms around herself.
Lucien stayed by the door, giving her space.
Minutes passed. Maybe ten. The silence stretched, not uncomfortable but heavy.
Finally she spoke without looking at him. “Tell me the truth. All of it.”
He exhaled slowly. “Where do you want me to start?”
“The beginning.”
He crossed the room and sat on the opposite end of the bench, leaving two careful feet between them.
“Two hundred and three years ago,” he began, “I lost my little sister to men who hated what we are. I swore I’d protect this pack with everything I had. The mountain gave me strength, long life, power. But it took something too. It told me my mate would come when I’d learned to hope again. I stopped believing a long time ago.”
He glanced at her then, eyes soft. “Then I started dreaming of a woman with auburn curls who drew pictures of wolves for children and cried herself to sleep every Christmas Eve. I watched you grow up through dreams I couldn’t enter. Last night, your tears opened the veil. The price was paid.”
Aurora’s throat ached. “I’m not strong enough for this.”
“You don’t have to be,” he said simply. “You just have to choose.”
Outside, snow kept falling. Inside, the mark on her collarbone pulsed gently, like a second heartbeat learning the rhythm of his.
Somewhere in the great room, a child laughed. Someone started singing “Silent Night” in a low, off-key baritone.
Aurora closed her eyes and listened to Christmas happening around her for the first time in seventeen years.
She was still terrified.
But for the first time in a very long time, she wasn’t alone.
- Writer
